Use AI in These 4 Ways to Scale Your Outbound Call Center

If you’re looking to scale your call center’s outbound operation, artificial intelligence (AI) can help in a big way. It’s especially helpful for call centers in industries like health insurance.

The insurance vertical, for example, often scales outreach around open enrollment each year. As a high-pressure time of the year, call centers need to operate efficiently and at an even higher scale when it’s open enrollment.

AI shoulders a portion of the outbound workflow to help your team operate at peak efficiency — even during high-stakes times of your business.

For your call center, AI is most helpful as a machine agent that can hold personalized voice conversations. This is called conversational AI. It uses voice recognition software to read vocal queues and tailor responses based on the answers. Look for conversational AI with:

How to use conversational AI at your call center
Conversational AI boosts your call center’s efficiency, whether you’re selling the actual offers or live transfers. This is primarily because agents no longer need to pre-qualify leads themselves. A conversational AI agent asks the initial questions and only transfers qualified leads to human agents.

Conversational AI takes pre-qualification off your agents’ plate. It asks your initial questions and records and updates the lead data based on the answers it receives. From there, it only transfers qualified leads to live agents.

It also immediately recognizes leads with incorrect phone numbers or missing information, so agents don’t need to spend time verifying lead accuracy.

As a result, your agents are more productive, happier, and more likely to convert their calls.

But all too often, agents spend their first minute of each call on qualifying questions. That time adds up quickly — we all know how many calls your agents aim to make each day, each week, and each quarter. Over time, shaving a minute off each call could transform the output of your entire sales team.

AI can have a conversation that asks the right questions for an agent. Then, on pass off, the agent can pick up where the AI left off. This is especially true when AI uses recordings of a real human voice instead of computer-generated sounds. Conversations sound natural and friendly, rather than robotic. As a result, being transferred to a live agent feels seamless.

Call centers have less control over inbound calls. It’s hard to determine how qualified an inbound call is before it reaches an agent.

Conversational AI can identify inbound calls and assess if the caller is an existing lead. It can then route the caller to the right place. For instance, the AI may answer the call and handle initial questioning if an inbound caller is reaching out for the first time. But the AI may route the to an agent if the caller is also an existing qualified lead in your system.

In doing so, your agents aren’t distracted or dropping everything for an inbound call that may — or may not — turn into a sale.

Want to get started with AI for your call center? Check out our Conversational AI Agent. Or call (844) 447-2929 to hear our Conversational AI dialer.